US-trained rebels in Syria refuse to fight against Al-Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front

Most Syrian rebel groups have as their first priority defeat of the Assad government. However, they will defend themselves against other more radical Islamist rebel groups if they are attacked which has happened with the Islamic State and Al Nusra front.

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The US policy has been to emphasize first and foremost the battle against the Islamic State in Syria. The result is not only outright tension between US trained and supported groups but even attacks on them by other rebels. The most recently trained group of rebels was attacked and routed by the Al Nusra front. The US program to train and equip rebels to fight IS began in May. Early on in the U.S.-led bombing campaign against IS back in November of 2014 the Al-Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front has been a target as well with disastrous results as far as US relationships with other rebel groups is concerned. The US has continued this policy even though the Al Nusra Front itself has fought against IS and is also a key force fighting Assad in areas such as Aleppo.

The rebels trained by the US are now refusing to fight back against the Al Nusra front insisting they were told that they were to fight IS. Fighting against the Front not only exposes them to the type of devastating attack they have just recently suffered but will bring down the wrath of other rebel groups upon them. The US view must be that whoever pays the piper calls the tune.

Back in May, Al-Nusra leader Abu Al-Golani said that the Front had no plans to target the West but said its options were open should the Americans continue attacks against them. Every group he noted has the right to defend themselves. He described the rebels supported by the US as "the arms" of the US government in Syria. The recent attack caused the US supported group not only to abandon their base but, as mentioned, to refuse to fight back. In recent months the Front defeated two other Western-back rebel groups forcing them to disband. The US push to form an effective proxy force on the ground to battle IS is in complete disarray.

The US has recently upped its involvement in Syria by declaring that they will bomb any group whether Assad or rebel forces that attack US-backed rebels. This is unlikely to have any effect except to turn the vast majority or rebel forces even more against the US. The US first bombed Al-Nusra front last September causing outrage among almost all rebel groups. The Nusra Front has taken further steps to complicate US policy in Syria by withdrawing its forces fronting the Islamic State in areas that Turkey and the US plan to be a "safe zone" on the border with Turkey. The Front said the decision was taken to avoid cooperating with the US-Turkish plan to create a safe zone in northern Aleppo province along the Turkish border.

Obama may have trouble finding his moderate Syrian rebels to train and arm

Obama's strategy for battling the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq envisions using proxy troops on the ground rather than US forces. In Iraq there are the Kurdish peshmerga and Iraqi forces.

Kurdish forces will also fight against the Islamic State in Syria. Obama intends to spend a half billion dollars to arm and train "moderate" rebels to carry out attacks against the Islamic State as well. After the House approved the bill it passed the Senate by a vote of 78-22. The vote was on a combined bill to fund the government and prevent a shutdown and this makes it unreliable as a measure of support for Obama's mission. However, many analysts doubt Obama will be able to find many rebels who will share the Obama vision of what should happen in Iraq.
 Even moderate rebels believe the first order of business should be defeating the Assad regime rather than fighting against the Islamic State. Moderate rebels were incensed that US bombing hit not only the Islamic State but also the Al Nusra Front an Al-Qaeda approved group that is cooperating with other rebels against the Assad regime. Few of the groups operating on the ground against Assad espouse liberal democratic values, but the Free Syrian Army has been considered a moderate group — at least in that the umbrella group is not explicitly fighting for an Islamist type state as are the Islamic Front, one of the larger rebel groups. However, as this Al Jazeera article points out, there are fatal flaws with the FSA: The FSA is currently the weakest force on the ground in Syria, a result not only of inadequate foreign backing compared with that of rival Islamist and extremist factions, but of its own internal divisions, byzantine leadership structure (based in Turkey) and rampant corruption. President Obama himself recently admitted it was a “fantasy” to believe a bunch of “doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth” ever had a chance of overthrowing the Moscow-backed regime of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad by themselves.
The FSA is an umbrella group composed of small sub-groups across Syria who fight under the FSA banner, but there is no clear chain of command nor cohesive ideology that unites them. The FSA continually loses fighters to other better-funded Islamist groups and even the Al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat Al Nusra and the Islamic State. When the FSA does take territory from Assad, it is usually through cooperation with more radical groups. Even when it has taken territory it often loses it, as happened in the north when the Islamic State or ISIL as it then was, simply took the area from the FSA.. Many analysts believe that Obama is interested only in ensuring that the rebel forces remain strong enough to force Assad to the bargaining table but not strong enough to defeat his forces.
 Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma said: “Frankly we’ve seen too many failed states fill up with jihadist militias. The FSA wouldn’t bring unified rule in Syria, they would bring Somalia, just like you’ve already got in the north.” However defenders of the FSA and the western-backed political group the Syrian National Coalition believe that better arms and training would solve the defection problems of the FSA and make it a stronger fighting force. Critics point out that the $500 million set aside for training and equipping moderate rebels is nowhere near what is thought to be required to combat Assad effectively. The US wants these rebels to fight the Islamic State first but even most members of the FSA oppose that. Abelnasr Farzat, a top FSA commander in the Aleppo area until last year but now based in Turkey said: “We must first eliminate the root cause of terrorism, and then the consequences of terrorism." While the US wants peace talks and political negotiations to end the conflict, very few FSA fighters would agree to this.
The US had a decade to train and arm the Iraqi army but the resulting forces were not up to combating determined Islamic State fighters. Even some US lawmakers opposed Obama's plans. Rand Paul, a Republican Senator from Kentucky said: "Intervention that destabilizes the Middle East is a mistake. And yet, here we are again, wading into a civil war." Senator Mark Begich, a Democrat from Alabama, also disagreed with Obama's policy and suggested that Arab countries should be leading the way in fighting the Islamic State. Begich nevertheless voted for the bill since he wanted to ensure that the government was funded.
 The proposal to choose moderate rebels and then arm and train them inspired the Borowitz Report in the New Yorker to create an application form to be submitted in order to receive weapons from the US that consists of a series of questions. Here is one:
  If I were given a highly lethal automatic weapon by the United States, I would: A) Only kill exactly the people that the United States wanted me to kill B) Try to kill the right people, with the caveat that I have never used an automatic weapon before C) Kill people only after submitting them to a rigorous vetting process D) Immediately let the weapon fall into the wrong hands
Obama's plans may also be foiled by rebels deciding to agree not to fight radical Islamists even the Islamic State as long as they join in fighting the Assad regime. There are reports of a truce being negotiated in at least one area already. After the US bombed not only the Islamic State but Al Nusra as well, there were many demonstrations not just in support of Al Nusra, the Al Qaeda-linked group that cooperates with the rebels but the Islamic State as well. An article in CounterPunch even suggests that the none of the groups of rebels in series of any significant size are not moderate, that there really are no moderate rebels.

US bombings in Syria anger almost all Syria rebels

The Islamic State(IS) has captured territory held by other rebel groups and fought against them. Surely the rebels should welcome the strikes. However, the strikes were directed not only against IS but other radical rebel groups as well.

The US bombing attacks also targeted Jabhat al-Nusra(JaN), an Al-Qaeda-linked radical group but one that has mostly fought in cooperation with the FSA and other rebel groups such as the Islamic Front. There are reports that the bombing attacks were directed also at Ahrar al-Sham in the Aleppo area. The group is not linked to Al-Qaeda at all and operates in tandem with the Free Syrian Army that is supported by the west.
One US official explained: "We're characterizing our targets as Khorasan and ISIS but its possible others were there. It is a toxic soup of terrorists". Khorasan is a jihadist group that has migrated to Syria. It is associated with Al Qaeda and apparently includes a bomb-maker from Yemen. It hopes to hit targets in the west. James Clapper, Director of US National Intelligence claims that "in terms of threat to the homeland Khorasan may pose as much of a danger as the Islamic State (IS)".
While attacking the Nusra Front and Khorasan mayl seem quite reasonable from the point of view of the US war against terror, it makes no sense to Syrian rebels. Just when the rebels need all the help they can get against the Assad regime, the US actions appear to help him out in key areas such as Aleppo where the rebels are already having difficulties holding their ground and radical groups are an important fighting force. The US has claimed that it was bombing the Islamic State in Syria but instead it is attacking any radical rebel group that it does not like even though those groups are helping the Free Syrian army and other rebels against Assad.
The bombings are cheered on by the Asssad regime which originally opposed them as violations of its sovereignty and against international law. Syrian minister for national reconciliation, Ali Haidar, praised the attacks although Syria was still watching developments with caution: "As for the raids in Syria, I say that what has happened so far is proceeding in the right direction in terms of informing the Syrian government and by not targeting Syrian military installations and not targeting civilians.Notification of the Syrian government happened. Confirmation that they would not target Syrian military installations, and confirmation they would not target civilians happened." Civilians are not typically targeted in any event but are just collateral damage.
 Rebel groups of all stripes condemned the bombings. The Syrian Revolutionaries Front, a major secular coalition in the north-west of Syria that drove ISIS out of Idlib in January along with other rebel groups condemned the bombings claiming:"You help Bashar" Although bombing strikes targeted Idlib there are no IS forces there any more. One of the first condemnations of the strikes was by Harak Hazm an FSA militia operating mostly in Hama and numbering about 7,000:“The Hazem Movement rejects the external intervention of the US Coalition, which launched its first airstrikes on Tuesday in the governorates of Deir el Zour, Raqqa, al Hasaka, Aleppo, Idlib and Homs, with 11 civilians killed in rural Idlib province and five others in rural Homs province, as well as fighters from Jabhat al Nusra and the ISIS.These air attacks amount to *an attack on national sovereignty* and work to *undermine the Syrian revolution...We of the Hazem Movement hereby reaffirm our full commitment to the principles of the revolution, and emphasize that *our actions are guided solely by revolutionary principles and national interest, not by the demands of the international coalition...The only beneficiaries from the US coalition’s military intervention will be the Assad regime,.."
There have been demonstrations against the bombings in many rebel areas. While many are in support of the Nusra Front there are others which even express sympathy with the Islamic State: The enclosed You Tube video shows damage in bombings of Al Nusra Front positions: The only clear support for the bombings among rebel groups was the group supported by the west and Gulf state the Syrian Opposition Coalition(SOC) and the Supreme Military Command(SMC). The latter group supported "all earnest national forces and free international forces who are fighting terrorism but said that this should begin with attacking "the Assad Gang" whom the group claimed created the Islamic State.
 The aim of the US may to be to weaken or eliminate rebel groups it does not favor even though they are fighting cooperatively along with other rebel groups against Assad. The type of force that they will train will play the role of the Sons of Iraq in Iraq who were paid by the US government to fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq. This worked as long as the US continued to foot the bill. It may not work in Syria. The main rebel groups see radicals as allies as long as they work together against Assad. Destroying rebel's allies will not win any friends among the majority of the rebels even moderates. The ultimate aim of US policy may not be to defeat the Assad regime but to create a situation where there are more pro-western moderate rebels but who will be willing to negotiate with a war-weary and weakened Assad regime. Assad will be convinced to step aside and there will be a political settlement with the new government committed to fighting radical jihadists throughout Syria. Much of the material in this article derives from a long and very interesting article plus many links by Michael Karadjis from the University of Western Sydney to be found here.